17th May 2010, 01:33 PM
Dinosaur Wrote:To throw a slight spanner in all this, what happens on commercially confidential projects (which covers an awful lot of the consultancy work we do), would 'community participants' have to have their memories wiped afterwards?
And what happens with potentially contentious projects - new runway, new bypass, perhaps not particuarly popular with the community. Again I mentioned this on a previous thread but was again accused of being a precious archaeologist who doesn't want the public getting involved. The whole issue does come down to ownership - there is an idea that in order for people to engage with their past through archaeology they should be enabled to get their hands on stuff, ideally on site. That's fine, but we don't encourage people to have a go at conserving medieval documents in order to engage with their past. How about allowing them to run EH properties for a week? What about allowing restoration of important art works as a means of the public engaging with art? You see how low down the skills ladder archaeology is perceived. For some reason archaeology is now perceived as something to be physically taken part in order to engage with it rather than just engaging with the results. Again, that's fine and perfectly sensible to a limited extent, it just seems at risk of becoming all pervasive. People didn't used to think like this though did they? I'm sure it's a post New Labour concept and, as I said before, it smacks of tokenism sometimes - find the money to enable 'the public' to engage with archaeology on the ground, while at the same time fail to invest in museums, education, improving the skill set of those actually supposedly trained in archaeology in the first place. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it!